The Extinction of Menai. Chuma Nwokolo
looked at me suspiciously, like someone sensing a trick question. ‘I climbed the stairs and opened the door?’
‘Why? And don’t tell me you were feeling sleepy!’
‘Actually, I was rather hoping to get arrested. I was here years ago for a students’ beach party and I know where the housekeeper hides the spare key.’
‘I am renting right now; you realise you are, kind of, trespassing?’
‘Like I said, I was hoping to be arrested; instead I ended up with tea in bed.’ He considered the last of his egg sandwich and shook his head. ‘And a full English breakfast!’
I counted to ten with my eyes mentally closed, and asked quietly, ‘Why?’
He drained his tea and yawned. ‘Who . . . how . . . why . . . look at the pedestrian issues on your mind!’ He pushed his chair back. ‘Me, I’m into more earth-shaking matters.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like bombs!’ His honking laugh went very well with his macabre humour. ‘Bombs shake a lot of earth!’
With that, he rose and slung his rucksack on carefully. He squared his shoulders into the weight of it and looked into the garden, ‘Looks like a lovely day for it,’ he grudged, scratching his beard. He was no longer laughing. ‘I might as well get on with it.’
I edged closer to the block of kitchen knives. I was dealing with a plucky con man. Earth-shaking matters indeed. He was clearly anxious to make away with his swag. I hadn’t seen my laptop that morning, for instance, and I couldn’t afford to lose it. It had too many killer opening paragraphs with short story potential. ‘That’s not a bomb.’
‘It’s not?’ He shrugged the rucksack onto a kitchen counter and offered me a cord. ‘D’you want to pull-test it?’
I didn’t move.
I was torn between pushing this lunatic and his bag outside and mining him for inspiration for my next short story. This was exactly the sort of offbeat material Lynn would swoon over. I didn’t want to die in a bomb incident, but I felt compelled to prioritise my art—for the moment at least. After all, some authors had written their best sellers from prison, writing with boot polish on toilet paper. I was in a seaside resort, on the last day of a barren writing retreat. This seemed a chance to redeem myself: a short story begging to be written. All I needed was the gumption to interview a man carrying a bomb. ‘What put you up to this?’ I asked sympathetically, as he zipped up and reslung his bag. ‘You look a decent sort. Did the MI5 kill your parents? Are you half Palestinian? What’s your particular issue?’
‘It’s Google’s fault.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Pornography isn’t the only bad thing on the Internet,’ he explained. ‘Six months ago, my father was killed by—’
My heart raced. I was on to something: ‘The CIA? Microsoft? Was that why . . . ?’
He watched me warily. ‘Are you a communist or something? He was killed by a heart attack. It was right after he went bankrupt.’
‘Oh. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. We disliked each other, but at least he paid my uni fees till the end, even when I went a little off-schedule . . .’
‘How “off-schedule” were you?’
‘Let me put it this way, I was never going to graduate, all right? But I rather liked the student lifestyle—’
‘Do you mind if I just get the facts straight? How many extra months had you, sort of, logged?’
He glared. ‘Five extra years. Happy now?’
‘Sorry, we writers sometimes have to be journalistic in our research.’
‘So I was really feeling depressed, you understand, when I had to pull out of uni. I had no skills, no degree, no sponsor. That afternoon in the library, I googled suicide.’
‘Suicide?’ I blinked. ‘What skills do you need to be a waiter? Did you have terminal cancer as well?’
‘I was depressed and broke, all right? Anyway, I just wanted to check out my options, really. I already knew some painless ways to die, but I googled enjoyable and ended up on a website recruiting suicide bombers.’
‘I wouldn’t have put “enjoyable” and “suicide bomb” in the same sentence.’
‘Well, they were paying ten thousand quid for a suicide bomber.’ He patted his clothes, searching for something. ‘That’s plenty of enjoyment right there.’
‘What is this website? Who are these people?’
‘What! Who! Give me a break! It’s just another NGO attracting more funding than they can spend. They’ve been in the suicide bombing business for years. They’ve blown up all their permanent staff—apart from the top dogs of course . . .’
‘Since when did terrorist squads become NGOs?’
‘Don’t be simplistic. Not all suicide bombers are terrorists. This NGO is at the cutting edge of the anti–global warming lobby.’
‘What?’
‘Their carbon-footprint reduction strategy is depopulation. It’s a more aggressive variation of Planned Parenthood. Not saying I buy their politics, mark you, but that’s the law for you, audi alteram partem.’
He finally found his wallet after searching the multiple pockets on his combat trousers. He opened it. Although bereft of currency notes, he had to negotiate a drift of VAT receipts and ATM slips to extricate a weathered A4 flyer folded several times over. ‘They had a backlog of volunteers. Had to wait months and months for my slot . . .’
‘A queue?’ Every time Dalminda opened his mouth he seemed to take another flight of fancy. The only thing that kept his story rooted in real life, and me listening as well, was the weight of his bomb. ‘That is, a queue of people wanting to kill themselves?’
‘I know how it sounds,’ he conceded, ‘but their conditions of service are out of this world.’
I was silent. I supposed he was now mocking me recklessly, but I knew that Lynn would go into raptures at the direction of our conversation. I wondered how it would look if I produced my Dictaphone.
‘I’ll tell you one of their recruitment stories: so this fellow and his family had been oppressed and exploited for generations. His—’
‘How? Was he detained without trial? Were they tortured and deported—?’
‘No.’ He had laid the matted sheet on the counter, and his tongue crept out from the corner of his mouth as he applied himself to the task of opening it up without ripping it.
‘Well?’
‘They were poor.’
He was not looking, and I rolled my eyes. Halfway to the ceiling, they were snagged by the eyes of an old major in a portrait, a whiskered fellow who looked every inch as bewildered as I was at the goings-on in his short let.
‘Anyway, he was married with seven children, all under ten years old, and then he had to get prostrate cancer as well.’
‘Oh.’
‘So this chap had three months to live when he stumbled on the website and signed on. Guess what. He blew himself up two months before he was due to die anyway, but his widow now gets a monthly pension; his kids are on scholarship. They now have a chance to break out of the oppression, the exploita—’
‘How many kids do you have?’
He shrugged. ‘None, yet.’
‘Are you married?’
‘No!’